Tokyo Drift

In the latest installment of his electronic music column, Andy Beta travels to Tokyo, where he discovers laptop orchestras, immense (and thriving) record stores, and Oneohtrix Point Never paying tribute to video game music.

Even after living in New York City for a decade—a mere subway ride away from the ever-present glare of Times Square—experiencing the full-sensory spate of Tokyo’s Shibuya-ku for the first time is blinding and deafening: All manner of chirps, digital blips, noise, even blasts of Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead! call out from every direction. I find myself in a state similar to that of Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation when landing in Japan, exhausted but open-eyed, agog yet fraught, flooded from every sensory organ and unable to process any of the data—is that really Tommy Lee Jones’ mug glaring out from canned coffee vending machines? Yes, it is.

Sides of office buildings sing “Happy Birthday” with five-story-high dancing candles; people play fútbol games on rooftops. There are moments in Tokyo when sound feels contemplative and disruptive at once. Amid the hush of Gyoen National Garden, there’s the buzz of an overhead loudspeaker. In a bustling restaurant, new orders are signaled with a digital bird chirp, while pop music assaults passers by outside. Trucks with mounted billboards drive around blaring Japanese rock band Glay; another truck promotes Foo Fighters’ Sonic Highways while idling in traffic. And hey, there goes Carl Craig strolling through Shibuya Crossing.

Maybe it’s not that surreal to see the Detroit techno godfather on the streets of Tokyo, as Craig is a mentor at this year’s Red Bull Music Academy, the month-long music festival and lecture series which was held in Asia for the first time last month. My first sleep-deprived night involves a trek out to the neighborhood of Negishi, to a venue called Dance Hall, which has all the accouterments of a 1950s jazz club. Onstage is Boredoms ringleader Eye, the Japanese demiurge who has been rather silent the past five years (though he has released a handful of head-swimming mix CDs available only in Japanese record shops). He conducts a circle of 18 Academy students—bleary-eyed yet intent, some in tie dye, hoodies, or dresses—all hunched over their laptops. It’s a slow build of lumbering sine waves that soon makes my face buzz and the posh club quiver in its fixtures.

Eye in the middle of RBMA's "Chaos Conductor" show

Having once called Eye’s conducting moves an “amalgam of airport ramp agent, hardcore screamer, and Bugs Bunny,” he is more graceful in his gestures tonight. Spinning on a drummers throne, his hands suggest a long wave goodbye or a quick scribble in the air when they’re not surfing the wind like a child reaching out of a car window. It’s a beautiful noise, even if it only makes the vertigo of my jet lag all the more pronounced.

And yet back in the hotel, my body resists sleep. I flick through Tokyo TV in the wee hours and find myself being Rickrolled: a station shows photos of Tokyo temples and ports, all soundtracked by Rick Astley’s Greatest Hits.

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B1 “The Larry Levan of Japan”

It’s hard not to be envious of Japanese record stores. Or rather, to be envious of their cultural reverence for music of all stripes, new and old. While streaming music has become paramount Stateside, the Japanese are still buying CDs. Every music shop I visit while in Tokyo ranges from four to six stories in height, with customers on every level. In the nearby neighborhood of Shinjuku, Japanese record mecca Disk Union has no less than six separate shops, each dedicated to a different genre. In one corner of a six-floor Tower Records, I see an assortment of mix CDs, each highlighting the back catalogs of now-forgotten ‘70s American record imprints. The self-proclaimed “King of Diggers,” DJ Muro, has one set that pays tribute to Brunswick Records, another to Miami’s T.K. Disco. And nearby are mixes that honor two of NYC’s defining disco labels: Salsoul and West End, both mixed by the legendary DJ Nori.

The man born Norihisa Maekawa is described to me as “the Larry Levan of Japan” by Alex From Tokyo, the respected deep house producer who releases music as Tokyo Black Star with producer Isao Kumano. “New York and Tokyo have been very connected culturally,” Alex tells me. “A couple of disco DJs and fashionistas ended up in NYC in the early ‘80s to experience that legendary nightlife, including Nori.”

The next day I meet up with DJ Nori, clad in a backwards ball cap, hoodie, and camouflage jacket. His reverence in Tokyo dance music culture quickly becomes apparent, when a younger Japanese student realizes that Nori is in the same room as him and pays his respects.

DJ Nori

“I came to New York City for the first time in 1983 to buy records and watch the DJs and the crowds,” DJ Nori says. A DJ since he was a teenager, he became taken with that “New York Sound” and came over in his early 20s, frequenting such clubs as Paradise Garage, the Palladium, and David Mancuso’s Loft.

Nori’s favorite club was his first one though: “The Saint was very special—a gay club specializing in disco, boogie, high NRG, and sleaze (the string-laden, decadent, 90 bpm subgenre of disco), all spun by DJ Warren Gluck. It was a very spacey space with a planetarium [dome] and images projected in front of you.” Another formidable influence was experiencing Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage, where Nori became enamored with soul music and the kinetic connection possible between DJ and dancers.

Nori was also in awe of the cutting-edge sound systems that could be heard at each club, thunderous and crystalline: “In Japan, sound was so-so, but I felt very excited by the sound systems, the lighting, and people.” He believes that, aside from dance culture, the biggest influence of New York on Tokyo nightlife might be the insistence on incredible sound. (In a curious shifting of time, it’s now de rigueur to have sterling sound in Tokyo nightclubs, while most modern New York venues have embarrassingly inadequate systems.)

He then asks me about New York and what I think about the city’s more restrictive rules concerning dance clubs and culture. I try to blame former mayor Rudy Giuliani and his reinforcement of cabaret laws, and it turns out that Japan has had issues with their own fueiho—anti-dancing—laws recently, which originally date back to the post-war era, when nightclubs were often used as prostitution fronts. Just a few weeks ago, though, these repressive strictures were lifted, and now Nori sees a positive shift ahead. “The club scene here now will have a bright future,” he says.

B2 “Bleeps of Rage”

Womb is tucked into a hotel-lined alley, a concrete bunker of a nightclub surrounded by sleeping neighbors. Once deep in the smoky recesses of the club, it reveals 30-foot high ceilings, banks of subwoofers, and a packed dancefloor.

“Why is no one dancing?” a Japanese girl asks aloud.

Tonight, the nightclub pays tribute to its distant electronic-music cousin, the video game. It makes a certain kind of sense, because while I revere Japanese artists, be it Keiji Haino or Nobukazu Takemura, the deepest infiltration of Japanese music into Western minds has occurred via video games. How many hours of Koji Kondo’s music did I subconsciously absorb as a child hunched over a Nintendo game console? Earlier in the day, I came across a curious byproduct of ‘80s video game covers from the incisive Haruomi Hosono that maniacally recreates the soundtracks to a number of old arcade games like “Dig Dug”, “Mappy”, and “Xevious”. It’s such a straight-faced recreation of those blips and tinny melodies that’s unbearable to hear as an adult (though the 12” remix of “Xevious” is hot).

Oneohtrix Point Never at RBMA's "Cart Diggers" show

The Academy has produced a documentary video series featuring these influential video game composers called “Diggin’ in the Carts” and tonight, these old 8- and 16-bit compositions interact with new musicians onstage. Yuzo Koshiro, considered the “king of chiptune music” by 1UP Magazine, has his “Streets of Rage” soundtracks updated in the new century. But with grace notes of house synths, electro-funk, and trance music already in its chips, it doesn’t really need the bigger bass.

Oneohtrix Point Never’s Dan Lopatin headlines the night with “Bullet Hell Abstraction IV”, a new piece dedicated to danmaku, the vertical scrolling video games better known as “bullet hell” shoot ‘em ups. Two giant screens scroll levels of the delirious “DoDonPachi DaiOuJou” on either side of the producer as furious frequencies and drill bit drums open the set. Suddenly, I’m reminded of a moment earlier in the day when I briefly stuck my head into an arcade in Shibuya, where Japanese sit in front of row after row of video games and chain smoke, the cumulative din reaching a deafening level.

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As “Bullet Hell Abstraction IV” progresses, more space infiltrates the stuttering noise. Angelic tones, off-kilter melodic fragments, and abrasive frequencies all mingle. The violence becomes as mesmerizing as the game itself, a thing of beauty. At the show’s end, Lopatin beckons off-stage to the Ennio Morricone of danmaku soundtracks, composer Manabu Namiki, who comes out as if from behind the wizard’s curtain, clad in a “Dig Dug” T shirt. He takes a quick bow before the nightclub crowd. And once the video game bleeps are silenced and club music begins to thump, the dancing starts.